Enterprises often maintain various types of documents that are stored in different places for different purposes. In many cases, such documents are created and stored according to a variety of different software applications and storage systems. For example, documents may be generated using word processing applications, spreadsheet applications, presentation applications, note applications, graphic design applications, photographic applications, and the like. Meaningful access to a particular type of document has historically required a local installation of an application supporting that document type, even to simply view the document.
With the widespread use of mobile computing and web based hosts, such as web mail servers and content servers, the need to access a document from a computing device lacking a local installation of the supporting application has become increasingly common. In response, attempts to provide support for selected document types through the web based host so as to avoid the need for a local installation of the supporting application have been made. Typically, this has been approached in one of two ways. First, some web based hosts natively support viewing widely used document types through embedded applications. Full support including document editing is not offered by the embedded applications. Second, external applications designed to integrate with web based hosts have been developed. Integration of an external application and a host generally requires each of these two programs to have specific knowledge of the application programming interface of the other. The external applications designed for integration with a particular host are generally required to participate in the authentication scheme(s) used by the host. Moreover, because the external application is generally given broad access to the host content, a two-way certificate exchange is commonly used to establish a trust relationship between the host and the external applications. As a result, external applications are not portable or useful with a significant number of hosts. Use of the external application is limited to a specific host, and support for various document types is limited to the available external applications designed for a particular host. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.